Official Ubuntu Membership means recognition of significant and sustained contribution to Ubuntu or the Ubuntu community.

Membership of the Ubuntu community means recognition of a significant and sustained contribution to Ubuntu and the Ubuntu community.

Requirements for Membership

Contributions in all areas are welcome.

There are many different ways of contributing to Ubuntu. Contributions are valued and recognized whether you contribute to artwork, any of the LoCoTeams, documentation, providing support on the forums, the answers tracker, IRC support, bug triage, translation, development and packaging, marketing and advocacy, contributing to the wiki, or anything else. The whole community needs each other and depends on each other. Whichever way you choose to bring benefit to Ubuntu and help others is very much appreciated. (To review the list of ways to contribute to Ubuntu, have a look at the Teams page.)

Ubuntu benefits through contributions to upstream projects and Debian specifically. While contributions to those projects are appreciated and worth being recognised, involvement in Ubuntu is required. After all it's all about Ubuntu membership.

The idea that only technical contributions (like patches or uploads of packages) or only contributions which give rise to karma in Launchpad is incorrect. The community is much broader and more diverse than that and it is sufficient to demonstrate significant and sustained contributions in any area of the Ubuntu community. It is important that members demonstrate the ability to interact with others, so detailed endorsements from others are important criteria that are evaluated during your application, because they give better insight into specific parts of the community. Testimonials from members of various parts of the community are appreciated, even if they're not Ubuntu members themselves.

In addition to interacting with others, you need to be Community savvy: so you need some insight into the community and be involved with it.

See below for the procedure to be followed to obtain membership and advise on how to prepare your membership application.

Procedure for Obtaining Membership

We look for sustained and significant contributions. While there is no precise period that we look for, it is rare for applications to be accepted from people contributing for less than 6 months. If you are unsure if your contributions constitute as sustained and significant, ask your team mates and other Ubuntu members. Maybe they can even add some kind of endorsement to your application.

In each case, you need to add your name to the agenda for the next meeting of the membership board for your region, or the team council, and prepare carefully according to the instructions below.

The regional membership boards hold meetings in the early evening in the relevant region. If this time is not convenient for you, you can attend a meeting of a membership board for one of the other regions.

A chart showing the different methods of obtaining Ubuntu Membership is available in png format. Aubergine text indicates councils that you can go to in order to receive Ubuntu Membership.

Other venues for obtaining Membership

In addition to the Regional Membership Boards, who handle the bulk of membership approval, there are other groups in Ubuntu that handle specific other cases.

If your primary contributions to Ubuntu are:

in Edubuntu, you might want to add your application to the Edubuntu/Council agenda and attend a meeting there

in Kubuntu, you might want to add your application to the Kubuntu/Meetings agenda and attend a meeting there

very technical (Ubuntu development, packaging and the like), you might want to follow the UbuntuDevelopers process

For contributions that are mostly within the IRC area, you might want to add your application to IRC/IrcCouncil/MeetingAgenda and attend a meeting there. More information on the specific process at: IRC/Membership

For contributions primarily related to providing support via the Ubuntu forums, you can apply via Forums Membership .

Preparing your Application

It is vital to be well prepared for the meeting. You need to convince the membership board that you have contributed to Ubuntu.

Personal wiki page

Your contributions should therefore be carefully documented on your personal wiki page. Include the following details:

A summary of your contributions to Ubuntu (no longer than 2-3 lines)

A link to your Launchpad profile

A complete description of your contributions to Ubuntu

Your plans and ideas for Ubuntu in the near and far future

Code of Conduct

You must have signed the Code of Conduct (see the GnuPrivacyGuardHowto for more info on this), prior to applying for membership.

Testimonials

If there are recognized members of the Ubuntu community supporting you at the meeting, this will definitely speed up the process of approving you. If your "sponsors" can't attend the relevant meeting, ask them to leave a testimonial on your wiki page about your contributions.

Note: They do not need to be Ubuntu Members, just a part of the community, even your local community. Testimonials in languages other than English are fine. Some members of boards are multilingual, and if not, they can use a translation tool.

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